(Adapted from a post at
Needlenose.)
Anonymous Liberal caught an important passage in Sunday's Washington Post Plame article:
By early June, several weeks before Libby is said to have known Plame's name, the State Department had prepared a memo on the Niger case that contained information on Plame in a section marked "(S)" for secret. Around that time, Libby knew about the trip's origins, though in an interview with The Washington Post at the time, he did not mention any role played by Wilson's wife.
Is the Post hinting--in some cryptic sort of way--that Libby may have perjured himself? This paragraph seems to indicate that Libby knew the story behind Wilson's trip in early June, well before his conversations with Judith Miller. Doesn't that contradict Libby's grand jury testimony, as reported by the Post on Friday?
The short answer: Yes. See the extended text for details, and take the poll.
Here's the background -- as Plame aficionados know, one of the writers of the Sunday
Post article was Walter Pincus, who also wrote about Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger in June 2003, a month
before Robert Novak revealed that Wilson's wife was an undercover CIA employee. In
that article, Pincus wrote:
The CIA's decision to send an emissary to Niger was triggered by questions raised by an aide to Vice President Cheney during an agency briefing on intelligence circulating about the purported Iraqi efforts to acquire the uranium, according to the senior officials. Cheney's staff was not told at the time that its concerns had been the impetus for a CIA mission and did not learn it occurred or its specific results.
. . . He and his staff did not learn of its role in spurring the mission until it was disclosed by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on May 6, according to an administration official.
The new
Post story makes clear that an interview with Libby was the basis for what "Cheney's staff" knew as of the first week of June in 2003. Which, if you wanna get all fussy and technical,
does kinda contradict the
alibi Libby floated last week (if not earlier):
According to a source familiar with Libby's account of his conversations with Miller in July 2003, the subject of Wilson's wife [i.e., Plame] came up on two occasions. In the first, on July 8, Miller met with Libby to interview him about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the source said.
At that time, she asked him why Wilson had been chosen to investigate questions Cheney had posed about whether Iraq attempted to buy uranium in the African nation of Niger. Libby, the source familiar with his account said, told her that the White House was working with the CIA to find out more about Wilson's trip and how he came to be selected.
In this version, Libby
didn't know on July 8th how Wilson's trip came about -- but, in fact, he had talked about it with Walter Pincus of the
Post a month earlier. Which means that Libby either (A) lied to Judith Miller during the conversation, (B) talked to Miller about something else but lied during his grand jury testimony, or (C) lied to the
Post (through his lawyer) about what he told the grand jury.
If option (B) is the case, then Libby is in some serious hot water with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. And either option (A) or (C) is probably raising plenty of eyebrows within the investigation, in terms of communicating the morality of the people they're dealing with.
P.S. As alert readers may have noticed, there are plenty more loose ends to be pulled on here. This is my diary for the day, but I'll update or link in comments to any follow-up posts I put up over at Needlenose.